Industry POV

Welcome to the world of 'suggested content'

07 Feb 2017

Communication came of age when brands began to involve digital plans in their marketing mix. Digital was rewarded in the form of augmented media spends and saw a renewed focus on the strategy front.

Communication came of age when brands began to involve digital plans in their marketing mix. Digital was rewarded in the form of augmented media spends and saw a renewed focus on the strategy front. However, the digtial medium’s true revolution will be when content is tailor-made and used exclusively for the platform, ceasing to be mere adaptations of its traditional counterparts.

Users are spread across owned, earned and paid media, and each of these elements is crucial to a successful digital marketing strategy. This is also a great way to ensure that you are utilising your content recommendation platforms well to drive traffic and gain higher revenues. What’s ironical is that data is exploding like never before, and audiences’ attention spans are decreasing in equal proportion.

Thus, it becomes vital to keep content relevant, personalised, filtered and crisp. Data must be minutely analysed — what people are searching for, liking, reading, sharing, commenting on, buying, etc to understand how to in turn engage with users.

Content discovery solves this problem effectively. Marketers from different industries, especially in sectors like publishing, will be seen gradually asking for content discovery performance solutions owing to its ability to grab eyeballs, increase traffic and thereby revenues.

Having said that, content discovery is far from dethroning ‘search’. In search, a majority of the time, you are dealing with an immensely active audience who is already looking for something.While content discovery will emerge and pave its own growth trajectory, it won’t step on the toes of search. Meanwhile, welcome to the world of ‘recommended posts’, ‘suggested content’ and ‘you may also like’.